Now that Governor Phil Bryant has signed a law requiring every abortion provider to have admitting privileges at a local hospital, the state's only remaining abortion clinic's existence will be threatened when the measure kicks in on July 1. Opponents of the law contend that forcing the clinic to close will make life much more difficult for Mississippi women and may even lead to a regression to dangerous methods like back alley abortions. One brave Republican has chosen to address that concern by acknowledging that yes, desperate pregnant women may end up filleting their uteruses with coat hangers. His response? "But, hey. You have to have moral values."

The gentleman/scholar responsible for that puzzling set of moral principles is Republican State Representative Bubba Carpenter, who spoke to the Alcorn County GOP on Thursday. In a jaw-droppingly insensitive talk was captured by The Maddow Blog, Carpenter reveals that the intent of Mississippi's new clinic regulations wasn't actually to make women safer at all, but rather to make it impossible to obtain a legal abortion in Mississippi. He said,

It's going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to— Roe vs. Wade. So we've done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They're like, 'Well, the poor pitiful women that can't afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger. That's what we've learned over and over and over.'

But hey, you have to have moral values.

Translation: we succeeded in passing a law will waste taxpayer money defending legal challenges that it will lose, but its passage shows that we're real dickholes whose "morality" is the stuff of dystopian horror fiction. How can someone call themselves "pro life" with a straight face when they're actually not interested in protecting life at all, but rather punishing women who don't embrace motherhood at every opportunity by either forcing them to be pregnant or end their pregnancies by hiring untrained charlatans to attack their ladyparts like a clogged rain gutter?

But it gets worse. When asked about the language he used, Carpenter blamed black people. "That was what a lot of our critics on the House floor said during the debate. That was just some language that some of the African-Americans used." Why the race of the critics of Mississippi's abortion ban mattered is something hidden in the mysterious crevices of Bubba Carpenter's enlightened mind.

Aside from the fact that Mississippi Republicans essentially lied about being interested in women's safety in the blind pursuit of blocking women's access to health care (which is actually gross, in a "how do you sleep at night?" sort of way) or the fact that Bubba wanted to make it known that he disagreed with certain black people, the real kicker of Carpenter's quote is the "But, hey." Back alley abortions! That's the way the cookie crumbles! That's just a risk we're going to have to take!

"Pro life" male politicians who don't care if women resort to coat hangers: because fuck women. And then force them to have the baby.